OCLC CJK Users Group 1999 Annual Meeting

Saturday, March 13, 1999
Boston Hilton
40 Dalton Street
Boston, MA 02115

(Continental Breakfast provided)

Agenda

   8:00-8:30 am    Continental Breakfast       Hosted by OCLC

   8:30-9:10 am    General Membership Meeting

     8:30-8:50     Chair's Report              Abraham J. Yu

     8:50-9:10     RLG East Asian Librarians

                    Forum Report               Hideyuki Morimoto

   9:10-10:35 am   Program Committee Meeting

     9:10-9:15     Introductory Remarks        Yu-lan Chou

     9:15-9:45     The Coming of Digital Libraries: What this Means to

                    East Asian Scholars and Librarians

                                               Dr. Ching-chih Chen

                                               Simmons College

     9:45-10:05    CIP and Cooperative Cataloging Program in Taiwan

                                               Ching-hua Huang

                                               National Central Library

    10:05-10:15    Chinese Geographical Names: from Wade-Giles to Pinyin

                                               Fung-yin Simpson

    10:15-10:35    OCLC CJK 3.0 Experience: Reports from Field Test Sites

                      Harvard-Yenching Library; University of California,

                      Berkeley; University of California, Irvine;

                      University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;

                      University of Oregon (written report);

                      University of Southern California

  10:35-10:45 am   Break

  10:45-12:30 pm   OCLC Report

     * General Report on OCLC activities and OCLC CJK services

                                               Gary Houk

     * Response to CJK Users Group Suggested Topics

                                               Gary Houk

     * CJK and Arabic Cataloging Project       Marty Withrow

     * OCLC CJK Report Focused on CJK 3.0 and User Training

        and Support Issues                     Hisako Kotaka

     * CJK Contract Services Report            Bing Yu

     * Questions and Answers

Minutes

After a continental breakfast hosted by OCLC, Abraham Yu, Chair, called the general membership meeting to order at 8:30.

CHAIR'S REPORT

Mr. Yu thanked OCLC for providing breakfast and a wonderful meeting place.

He welcomed all those present, especially non-members, new members, those from Harvard-Yenching, and two special guests:Dr. Ching-chih Chen, Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, and Ms. Huang Ching-hua from the National Central Library of China.

As the outgoing Chair, Mr. Yu shared the following acrostic to describe the OCLC CJK program:

1. •Outstanding and remarkable services
   

2. •Comprehensive world-class database
   

3. •Low cost and affordable pricing structure
   

4. •Creative, innovative, and user-friendly software
   

Mr. Yu identified the following challenges for OCLC in the coming year:

Expansion of the OCLC CJK database.
Now that Waseda University's Japanese records have been successfully loaded, Mr. Yu encouraged OCLC to negotiate for records from the National Library of China in Beijing, the National Central Library in Taipei, and the Korean Central Library MARC. He also urged OCLC to load the CJK electronic data files (submitted by the Users Group in 1998) and Sikuquanshu (the Four Treasuries), which would enhance OCLC's Electronic Collections Online services.

Integration of OCLC CJK Software.
Mr. Yu hoped that OCLC CJK 3.0 will be further integrated with Passport for Windows, which would make it more attractive to current and potential users.

Pinyin Conversion.
Mr. Yu hoped that, regardless of the romanization system adopted for the master record, OCLC would continue to support both Wade-Giles and pinyin searching and viewing. He also hoped that OCLC would develop a mechanism to assist CJK users with the conversion.

Authority Control.
Mr. Yu posed several questions about OCLC's plans for authority control for CJK headings, addressing the following issues: quality control in WG-PY conversion, development of an automated authority record creation program, CJK characters in authority records, Web-based interface and links between authority and bibliographic databases.

Mr. Yu then shared his vision for a "World-class Software". His dream software is a multitasking program, which would be an integration of OCLC CJK with Passport for Windows, with Web-based interface, a multilingual and multiscript authority file, an acquisitions module, an automated authority record creation program, and an improved Z39.50 client module. This software would have cataloging and reference functionality, would display CJK characters on the Internet, and would also serve as a simple word processor. This "all in one" and "one for all" integrated multipurpose software could interact with standard word processors such as MS Word.

Reporting on major activities of the Group during the past year, Mr. Yu said that the Executive Board members had a meeting at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia in January 1999.

Mr. Yu announced the retirement of Mr. Edward Martinique. The former Users Group Member-at-Large Officer (1993-1995) retired in September 1998 after 27 years of service at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Mr. Martinique served as the Editor of CEAL Bulletin for 9 years. He was an expert in Chinese traditional bookbinding and authored Chinese Traditional Bookbinding: a Study of its Evolution and Techniques in 1983.

Mr. Yu reported that six academic libraries and two public libraries participated in the OCLC CJK 3.0 field test for two months, from November to December 1998.

Mr. Yu thanked Ms. Hsi-chu Bolick, Chair of the Membership Committee, 1998-1999, for updating the Users Group membership directory before the last election. Mr. Yu reminded everyone to report any changes for future updates. Non-members were invited to sign up at the Group's home page at http://oclccjk.lib.uci.edu/

Mr. Yu also thanked Vickie Doll for her help in marking up the meeting minutes for the Group's home page. Although he is stepping down from the chairmanship, Mr. Yu will continue his service as the Group's Webmaster.

Mr. Yu reported that this year's election, conducted online for the first time via the Group's Web site, was found to be effective and efficient. The following outgoing officers, who served from 1997-1999, were acknowledged:

1. •Chair: Abraham Yu, University of California, Irvine
   

2. •Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Hideyuki Morimoto, University of California, Berkeley
   

3. •Chinese Officer: Yu-lan Chou, University of California, Berkeley
   

4. •Japanese Officer: Scott Edward Harrison, University of Washington, Seattle
   

5. •Korean Officer: Joy Kim, University of Southern California
   

6. •Member-at-Large: Hsi-chu Bolick, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
   

Then Mr. Yu announced the election results and introduced the new officers, who will serve from 1999-2001.

1. •Chair: Hideyuki Morimoto, University of California, Berkeley
   

2. •Vice Chair/Chair Elect: Phyllis Wang, University of California, Davis
   

3. •Chinese Officer: Hsi-chu Bolick, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
   

4. •Japanese Officer: Sharon Domier, University of Massachusetts
   

5. •Korean Officer: Joy Kim, University of Southern California
   

6. •Member-at-Large: Fung-yin Simpson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
   

Gary R. Houk, Vice President of OCLC Services, praised the outgoing officers for their dedicated service and presented each with a Certificate of Appreciation.

RLG East Asian Librarians Forum Report

Hideyuki Morimoto reported on the RLG East Asian Librarians Forum, which was held on 12 March 1999.

Harvard Yenching Library will continue to catalog on OCLC CJK, but will participate more fully in RLG East Asian Librarians Forum activities. There was a discussion on potential collaboration on collecting and providing access to primary source materials and gray literature supporting East Asian studies. The Library of Congress has been collecting Hong Kong dissident materials, and wishes to extend its gray literature collection to include Korean-language titles. The Japan Documentation Center's funding is running out in May 2000, but LC hopes to continue its service. LC's acquisition budget has been good, and Chinese book acquisition budget increased. LC has changed its vendor for Korean-language acquisitions. The Web page of Columbia's Lin Lung Project (a preservation project of the defunct Chinese journal, Lin lung on women studies) is scheduled to open to the public the week of March 15. The establishment of a cooperative working group was proposed to develop cooperative finding aids, solutions to problems (e.g., vernacular data inclusion in finding aids), a survey to determine where archival resources are held within each institution, to determine selection criteria, and to explore digitization and training issues. LC's collection policy of gray literature will be shared with the Group. Hoover's collection policy might be shared, pending administrative approval. An RLG cooperative project may start with unpublished primary source materials, rather than published rare materials.

The value of Toshokan Ryutsu Center records for collection development was discussed. Many found the vernacular data useful for cataloging. Information about other East Asian vendor records should be sent to Karen Smith-Yoshimura for RLG's investigation and possible follow-up. RLG was encouraged to pursue licensing agreements with CJK full-text database vendors. RLG will re-distribute the last CJK recon project survey results and will ask each institution to update the data.

RLIN CJK Users Discussion Group discussed various topics, starting with the RLIN Terminal for Windows, v. 5.0. Chinese characters are now in stroke count order, when invoked in character windows. One trade-off of this change is that simplified and traditional Chinese characters are no longer next to each other. The cursor bug has been fixed. Members wished that RLIN's vernacular fonts could be copied/pasted into a Unicode-enabled word processing system. Complete font repertoire has not yet been developed for Unicode (e.g., some archaic Hangul are not available). Eureka will support Unicode and pronunciation updates may be added next time. RLIN's new "Authority Record Assistant" generates authority records from an RLIN CJK bibliographic record. A Z39.50 Client retrieves bibliographic records from local system and generates RLIN authority records. This allows more authority record contributions to NACO. Regarding Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion, all records in all formats with fixed filed Lang:chi will be converted. Target fields are: 1xx, 245 |b / |c, 650 |a, and 505. Ayn, apostrophe, and alif will all be converted. Testing of the conversion program specifications will take place; RLG wishes to have some volunteer institutions.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEETING

Yu-lan Chou introduced the invited keynote speaker, Dr. Ching-chih Chen, Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, and a member of President Clinton's Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Dr. Chen's motivating talk, The Coming of Digital Libraries: What This Means to East Asian Scholars and Librarians, challenged East Asian Studies librarians to take advantage of the current digital environment. Dr. Chen engaged the audience's attention by sharing her almost 15-year "affair" with East Asian Studies with her internationally renowned PROJECT EMPEROR-I, which was supported by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and resulted in award winning interactive videodisk and multimedia CD products entitled The First Emperor of China. It led into how technology and humanities have converged during the last decades. With the dynamic development of information technology and the increasingly effective global information infrastructure, use of the Internet and WWW has become commonplace. Information technology has transformed "the way we communicate, deal with information, learn, work, conduct research, govern, doing business, health care, etc." As to the information's end, it is now possible for us to realize the "global digital library" and instead of "databases," it is possible to consider "knowledge bases" with real content. Thus, she challenged the audience to build efficient and functional "databases" on one hand, but also to expand their vision of information provision by thinking of the content-based "digital libraries" on the other. She then discussed in greater detail the problems and issues related to "digital libraries" from definition to the role of digital libraries, from technology related issues to information organization such as metadata and indexing, from access to user interface, from social and legal issues to multilingual, etc. Finally, she encouraged the East Asian Study librarians and scholars to collaborate more regionally, nationally, and globally by sharing their experiences in this new area, and then contemplating the sharing of their valuable resources digitally.

National New Book Information System and National Bibliographic Information Network (NBINet)
On behalf of Shu-fen Lin of the National Central Library (NCL), Shiny Huang read a paper titled "National New Book Information System and National Bibliographic Information Network (NBINet)" The NBINet provides basic cataloging information on all books registered with ISBN and CIP at the NCL's ISBN Center. Since its inception in 1989, over 251,000 publications have been registered with the ISBN program, with an average of 2,500 records added each month; over 100,000 records registered in the CIP program from 5,000 publishing centers. These records are accessible via the Internet http://www.ncl.edu.tw/isbn or on the SinoCIP CD-ROM, which updated bymonthly.

After the talk, there were some questions from the audience about NLC's usage of OCLC. Having previous conversations with the NLC on this issue, Yu-lan Chou read the following email exchanges between herself and Ms. Liping Sun, Director of the International Cooperation Office at NLC.

Q: Is NLC using OCLC for its cataloging?
A: Yes, NLC is now using OCLC for its Western language material cataloging. For Chinese materials, NLC is using the Chinese Book Classification System and the CNMARC format for cataloging purpose.

Q: Will NLC's Chinese cataloging be a part of OCLC's WorldCat in the future?
A: Because of the differences in MARC formats and coding systems, NLC's Chinese cataloging information is not yet able to be included in the OCLC WorldCat.

Q: Will NLC's Chinese rare book cataloging be incorporated into OCLC?
A: NLC is now doing on-line cataloging of Chinese rare books which is anticipated to be finished by the end of this year. By the year 2000, all information will be available from NLC's own Web site. Incorporating these into OCLC depends on several technical factors which have yet to be determined.

Q: How far back do the NLC's on-line cataloging data cover? What are their contents? Are all NLC's collection now on-line?
A: The earliest coverage of NLC's on-line cataloging is 1949. NLC is currently engaged in retrospective conversion project for pre-1949 cataloging. NLC is currently offering a CD-ROM which has more than 840,000 Chinese material cataloging records. The CD-ROM is updated twice a year and it is not available on the Web.

Q: Is NLC a participant in the OCLC ILL system? What is its loan policy to North American libraries?
A: NLC is not a participant in OCLC ILL. NLC is currently using the IFLA ILL standard and regulations. If the NLC joins OCLC ILL later, the same standard might be applied.

The NLC has plans to exhibit a collection of 100 selected rare books, manuscripts and rubbings collection at the Queens Borough Public Library and the Los Angeles Public Library later this year. Details will be announced later.

Chinese Geographic Names: from Wade-Giles to Pinyin
Fung-yin Simpson explained that, collaborating with Vicki Fu Doll, she created a Web page to help librarians, CJK catalogers, and library patrons to handle the upcoming Pinyin conversion more effectively. Using a Web browser, Ms. Simpson demonstrated the Project's Web page featuring five columns for five variations for each geographic name: Wade-Giles, former LCSH, revised LCSH, pinyin, and Chinese script. The Web page also provides related resources on Pinyin conversion information, reference materials, and links to other sites. This web page will be mounted in early April on the OCLC CJK Users Group home page at http://oclccjk.lib.uci.edu/ The contents of the web page will be updated and augmented periodically, following LC's progress.

OCLC CJK 3.0 Experience: Reports from Field Test Sites
Hsi-chu Bolick read two reports. The first was written by Daphne Hsu-Kuang Wang of the University of Oregon. The paper describes major features of the new software, including comprehensive documentation and online help, local file manager, searching, and editing. The second paper, by Jiajian Hu of Chicago Public Library, was a comparison of CJK 2.1 and 3.0, in which version 3.0 was found to be superior in batch searching, local save file, pinyin support, CJK and ALA characters entry. The new software was found less effective than the old in the following areas: stability, some help screens, and fixed field's multi-value code entry.

Informal exchange of information and experiences with field test versions from other OCLC CJK field testers followed. Both positive and negative feedback were shared. Among the problems reported were card printing on laser printer and CJK display and search capabilities of the Z39.50 client

OCLC REPORTS

After a break, OCLC Reports followed. [Recorder's note: for fuller information on this part, please refer to the OCLC Report by Gary Houk and staff members which has been posted on the Group's listserv in PPT format.]

Gary Houk gave a general report on OCLC activities and OCLC CJK services. He reported on news and major projects at OCLC, CJK services activity, database expansion projects, CJK record growth, CJK Users Group topics, Asia Pacific highlights, pinyin conversion issues and questions. In terms of Web access and interface strategy for OCLC services, he explained the company's strategic objectives, describing Web and traditional services strategy, global interfaces, Web strategy for Dewey, and access methods to OCLC. In summary, OCLC is moving toward integrated Web interface to all OCLC services. Web interface will have a standard look and feel, will be multi-lingual, multi-script, multi-format, accommodating multiple level of end-user sophistication, and will offer fewer options but better choices.

Questions and discussions followed. Regarding CJK electronic data files list, submitted by CJK Users Group in 1998, Mr. Houk said that nothing has been done, but OCLC will get to it when it can, at which point an update may be necessary. Regarding pinyin conversion, members expressed their serious concerns about the fact that OCLC is just "monitoring," rather than assuming a more active role, in this important process. OCLC was urged to prepare a time line for the conversion, become an active participant rather than to remain a passive observer and to take initiatives in preparing local systems, and to inform the OCLC Users Council about the serious nature of this project. Members asked if OCLC is prepared for a Day 1 scenario, as RLG is. Mr. Houk responded by saying that OCLC is committed to pinyin conversion, but he feels that OCLC should not duplicate the efforts of RLG. He assured that by July 1, 1999, a plan will have been nailed down. Regarding OCLC database expansion, James Cheng asked if NLC records will be part of OCLC. Yu-lan Chou replied that the China Marc will not be, but the English titles will.

Marty Withrow then reported on the Arabic Cataloging Project. OCLC, as a global information facilitator, is in the process of developing capabilities to support a pilot project to test cataloging of Arabic-language materials, including the Arabic vernacular characters. The Arabic Cataloging Pilot will allow users to search for MARC records, edit records, create and add records that are not found in WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog, and download a copy of the USMARC record to the user's local system. The Arabic Cataloging Pilot will provide a Windows-based interface based on the CJK 3.0 software, which will require the Microsoft Windows NT platform. OCLC is in the early stages of planning for the pilot; however, it is expected that the pilot study will begin during the first half of 2000. After the completion of the Arabic Cataloging Pilot, OCLC will evaluate the results of the study and will determine if a production product should be pursued.

Hisako Kotaka gave a report on the new OCLC CJK 3.0 software. She gave an overview of the system requirements, features and functionality, the Z39.50 Client, and described the new software's strengths over the old software. Ms. Kotaka announced that OCLC is planning two CJK 3.0 user update workshops at OCLC in late April or early May, 1999, and asked members to look out for an announcement on the OCLC-CJK listserv. OCLC and Regional Network also provide on-site or joint training sessions on a demand basis. After talking about CJK 3.0 technical issues, Ms. Kotaka said that CJK 2.11/2.11a will be supported through September 1, 1999. OCLC will end the product life of the old software on March 20, 2000. CJK 3.0 enhancement work has already begun, and it is expected that CJK 3.01 will be released in the summer of 1999.

Bing Yu gave a report on CJK contract services: AsiaLink, a relatively new collection development service; Techpro, a contract cataloging service; and CJK RetroCon. Ms. Yu also described OCLC CJK database quality control activities.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:30 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Joy Kim, Recorder
University of Southern California